The Week 100,000 Visitors Read My Blog

Oct 11, 2012

Last thursday I wrote the previous blog entry, a quick response to a post I read where the author thought coding was mostly for the young. I write stuff here when the muse strikes but I never worry about whether anyone will read it or not. If someone finds it interesting I let them post it somewhere and promote it but don't do anything myself.

I worked at home Friday and never looked at my home email. Later that evening I saw a ton of new twitter followers. Taking a look at Google Analytics a storm of people was reading that post and also the post I referenced in it, on Overtime.

Since that Friday, 100,000 visitors showed up, 60,000 on that day alone. Crazy. I got dozens of emails from people, both young and old, who commented either from my perspective, or wondering if they had what it took to code for that long.

My usual average day is generally 150-200 random visitors per day. Every few months I get a post which brings in 20,000+ plus (you can see many of those in the popular column on the right). This one post was read 78,000 times and the overtime post got an additional 38,000 or so.

My most popular post before this was the Kindergarten post which had 55,000. This wild week is pretty much the high point so far. This blog has been here since 2007, and a previous one with a different URL existed back to around 2003.

Half the visits were from the US, but surprisingly 10% came from Russia, where the Overtime post appeared on a popular development site. Visitors actually came from 162 countries, some of which I didn't realize even had programmers!

50% of the browsers were Chrome. Only 4% used IE. Not too surprising given the audience is mostly programmers. The iPhone and iPad naturally dominated the mobile visitors, which totaled nearly 20% of the visits. Based on this I intend to add some mobile design to my site.

The traffic came mostly from the usual places, programmer.reddit.com and news.ycombinator.com, but a strange 27% came from the infamous direct/none category that Google assigns to arrivals with no referrers. 13% came from the Russian site, habrahabr.ru.

A friend asked me on Facebook how much I made off of all the traffic. Nothing, since I have no ads or anything monetary. Programmers, I explained, are likely as not to block ads, ignore ads, avoid ads and generally not even notice them, so there is no point. I don't do this for money, it's just a cool way to add to the conversation in the programming world.

I am sure most blogs get way more traffic than this, but I just wanted to toss out a few stats that seemed interesting.

I don't have comments any more since (1) manual spam got to be too annoying and (2) performance could be affected. Currently I run this blog entirely on a Mini AWS instance using a LAMP stack. It didn't even breathe hard with 250+ people on it at a time. I like to keep the bandwidth requirement light as well.